This story appears in our Spring Art + Performance 2025 Issue, published on March 5, 2025.

Photos by Brittne Lunniss

When I walked into the Vera Project on a rainy Sunday morning, I spotted musicians whose work I’ve followed for years—Shaina Shepherd, Chris Martin of Kinski, Ben Verellen of Helms Alee, Bree McKenna of Tacocat, Shaun Crawford of Acid Tongue… But they weren’t onstage. They looked as sleepy as I felt, sitting in folding chairs on the showroom floor under the club’s overhead fluorescent lights.

It was barely 9 a.m. on October 27, just days before Halloween—and, even scarier, the 2024 Presidential Election—and 20 musicians from around the Pacific Northwest were coming together to kick off Rock Lottery 13.

Rock Lottery works like this: Twenty musicians are split into four bands of five by pulling names out of a hat. The new groups are given a bag of snacks, access to a practice space, and the directive to prepare at least three songs to be performed 12 hours later in front of a live audience. (They’re allowed one cover song—the organizers aren’t monsters.) The first Rock Lottery was hosted by the Good/Bad Art Collective in Denton, Texas, in 1997. Since then, dozens of installments—some official, some not so much—have been hosted all over the country in Denton, Seattle, Brooklyn, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Louisville, and beyond. Seattle’s last Rock Lottery was at the Crocodile on January 25, 2020. The Before Times.

My coffee hadn’t yet kicked in when Rock Lottery cofounder Chris Weber stepped onto Vera’s stage and signaled with the wave of a hat that it was time to begin. “The Rock Lottery hat is never wrong,” he says, and it’s as legendary as the project itself. The worn-out straw cowboy number is decorated with feathers, ribbon, and a small unidentifiable animal skull (real? Not real? Who can say?), and it has been around for as long as Rock Lottery itself. It’s held more than 1,000 names—including Mike Watt, Father John Misty, Reggie Watts, and members of Psychedelic Furs, the Murder City Devils, the Roots, They Might Be Giants, Harvey Danger, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs—and spawned more than 200 bands. It was also once eaten by a dog sometime in the 2000s, but was fixed right up with some emergency crafting. (The dog, I’m told, was also fine.)

The drummers are the first names plucked from the hat—every band gets one percussionist, who then draws their bandmates’ names. Faustine Hudson of the Maldives was called up to the stage, followed by Dave Abramson of Diminished Men, Justin R. Cruz Gallego (aka J.R.C.G.), and Nicholas Tazza of Algernon Cadwallader. Applause scattered around the room as each name was announced, and I attempted to scribble some notes despite having left my hand-eye coordination back in bed.

It’s not that I was covering Rock Lottery reluctantly. The opposite, actually. I embraced the opportunity for a fun distraction and considered it an easy assignment. I’d go hang out with some cool bands, take notes throughout the day, pull together some kind of light entertaining hour-by-hour breakdown of how Rock Lottery works behind the scenes, and collect my accolades for a job well done.

And I needed an easy win. The previous 10 months had kicked my ass. More than kicked it. The universe buckled me into a seat on the Scrambler, cranked it up to high, and walked away. In January, my mother-in-law learned her cancer had come back, and she began the long, emotional, mindfucking process of dying. My husband, her son, spent the first half of the year flying back and forth from our place in Seattle to her home in Alabama for weeks at a time. I’d visit when I could, when it was appropriate. After she died in March, and after my husband worked another couple of months to clean out her house, we both landed back in Seattle, finally in the same state again, ready to establish some semblance of stability. Or at least manage our grief by eating Kinder Happy Hippo cookies (her favorite) and distracting ourselves with Eurovision.

Just as summer arrived, The Stranger, where I’ve worked full-time since 2022, doing a job I moved across the country for, was sold. Such a situation is always rife with upheaval, even in the best cases. Are we gonna get shut down? Am I about to lose my job? I moved here for this job—what the fuck am I gonna do? The next month, with my job still intact but feeling precarious, my husband and I were told our landlord was going to sell the house. We had three months to find a new place.

They say the five most stressful life events are death, divorce, moving, major illness, and job loss. I told my husband if he divorced me, I would kill him.

On that Sunday, Rock Lottery Sunday, I needed to be looking for a house, I needed to be lining up movers, and I needed to be packing. Fuck, I needed to be grieving. But there was work to do. I had a new boss to try to impress and an impending election to try to ignore. So after the bands were formed, I hopped in the car with members of Band #2, featuring Dave Abramson, Ben Verellen, Numbers Power, Gabe Hall-Rodrigues, and William Cremin, and we headed to Verellen’s home studio in Greenwood.

In his heavy rock trio Helms Alee, Verellen uses his powerhouse vocals to sing/shout about mythical sea creatures and doom while delivering a wall of guitar noise that can rattle the solar system. Stranger music critic Dave Segal once said Abamson’s band, the Diminished Men, excel at “eerie, ominous jazz rock that evokes myriad noirish cinematic scenarios” and often refers to them as “one of Seattle’s best bands.” The pairing makes sense. The hat is never wrong.

But Floral Tattoo play explosive, symphonic pop and utilize everything from lap steel guitar and singing saw to synthesizers and a euphonium on their latest release, The Circus Egotistica; or, How I Spent Most of my Life as a Lost Cause. In Cumulus, Cremin makes bright power pop with Alexandra Lockhart, and it’s a must-hear for fans of Rilo Kiley and Waxahatchee, and Hall-Rodrigues’s band Foleada play traditional Brazilian forró. I had no doubt they could write a coherent song. They’re professionals. But three songs? In 12 hours? Lol, ok.

“Anyone got some riffs they’ve been chipping away at that their other band rejected?” asks Abramson.

Power started to play some version of a C into a D minor and everyone agreed it was interesting enough to explore. As Power twirled on it for a bit longer, the others politely waited their turn to add their own flair. One series of chords turned into another and then another, and suddenly, a song. After about an hour, they had produced a wistful three-and-a-half-minute, mid-tempo indie rock tune that sounded like something you’d listen to in 1994 while driving down a long highway thinking about someone you don’t want to be thinking about.

The band started hitting their stride just before noon as they began work on their second song. Hall-Rodrigues took the lead with his Petosa accordion, and it almost immediately started to sound like the soundtrack to a climactic scene in a silent movie about a murderous tycoon who’s haunting a young couple on their honeymoon at an Italian villa in the early 1900s.

Hall-Rodrigues pushed and pulled the accordion faster as Power added in some guitar, letting it build with the same energy as a slow but steady emerging storm. After a few bars of just accordion and guitar, Abramson started in with a waltzy beat while Verellen watched, waiting for his cue. Once Abramson switched to dramatic, drawn-out cymbal crashes, Verellen and Abramson exchanged grins, and, clearly vibing off the song, the bass and drums joined forces to hit the climax where, in the film (if there were a film), we would see the villain, the knife, the scream, the blood.

“That’s got some John Carpenter Halloween vibes!” Abramson exclaims as the music fades out.

They all agree it could be faster, and, the next time around, Cremin noodles with the keyboard, which introduces a sci-fi element. The mood shifts from an Italian villa to an alien-invaded Western in the 1940s, and I started to recall Edgar Allan Poe stories in my head. Halloween was just days away, after all.

So often, seeing how the sausage gets made shatters the illusion. When a magician reveals his secret, he becomes nothing more than an average dude with a lot of time on his hands and the patience to perfect sly maneuvers.

But witnessing art being made? It feels like you’re watching someone else’s dream. The room fills with sounds, and the musicians can’t explain how the notes come to them. They just do. There is air. There is quiet. Then there is music. The best I can tell, invisible sounds are picked up by electrical impulses of the brain, which signal the neurotransmitters to let the receptors know that they need to tell the body, the hands, the fingers, the feet that these are the notes to play, the words to sing, or the beat to build in order to express exactly what needs to be said, needs to be heard, and needs to be felt in this very moment. That’s how brains work, right? It’s real fucking magic! At least to me, a nonmusician. And that’s not for lack of trying—I’ve played clarinet, piano, and bass guitar, but my brain can’t grab the invisible sounds. My neurotransmitters are busted. My body plays the message all wrong when it’s received. So instead, I’ve spent much of my 25-year career writing about music—I’ve been to thousands of concerts, interviewed hundreds of musicians, and have even been lucky enough to be in the room while a few records were being recorded.

But Rock Lottery was different. The songs didn’t exist when I woke up that morning. Neither did the bands. And getting to see something come from literally nothing at all with a little bit of magic and a lot of vulnerable creativity and community has reframed every piece of music I’ve listened to up to that point and every piece of music I’ve listened to since. I had taken music for granted. It has always been there; I have always loved so much of it, but I stopped thinking about and appreciating where it came from.

Across the city, three more bands were doing what Band #2, later named Diatoms, were doing in Greenwood.

At Black Lodge, the band who eventually called themselves Jenny (best band name, by the way)—composed of Bree McKenna, Shaun Crawford, Sébastien Deramat, J.R.C.G., and Shaina Shepherd—were nailing a scorching rendition of “Season of the Witch.” In Vera’s showroom, Really Really I Love You had just formed—including members Faustine Hudson, Liv Victorino, Michael Hamm, Rebecca Gutterman, and Thomas Arndt—and were flirting with world music and jam-band vibes and getting wild with the percussion. They had three drummers going at once! Upstairs, the band who named themselves Minus One, featuring Nicholas Tazza and Chris Martin of rock-forward acts Algernon Cadwallader and Kinski, and Brad Loving of electronic project Reunion Island, lucked into a band with Anu Batbaatar of Zje Mongol. Batbaatar plays the horsehead fiddle box and does Mongolian throat singing, and the guys were wise to let her take the lead while they crafted their offerings around her unique (to Seattle, anyway) talents. The end result felt like watching a band from another planet present their music to us. The Rock Lottery hat is never wrong, indeed.

Now, months later, The Stranger is still standing, and I still have my job. My husband and I found a cute house to rent in Greenwood and moved in over Thanksgiving weekend. I think of my mother-in-law every day, but I’ve gotten pretty good with grief. Some of my favorite people are dead.

I can’t remember much about the finished songs I heard that night during the grand finale concert. But I do remember how they made me feel. I remember thinking, “Why isn’t Shaina Shepherd as famous as Brittany Howard?” “Is how I feel watching Shaun Crawford shred the guitar right now the same as how unsuspecting music fans felt the first time they saw Hendrix?” “How have I never heard of a horsehead box fiddle?” And “How has a band never thought to call themselves Jenny before?”

Had I stayed home that October morning, had I sunk into my urge to hide away, I would’ve missed my chance to witness it all. To see magic with my own eyes. Cheesy? Sure. Embarrassingly earnest? Call it what you want. But days after Rock Lottery’s return to Seattle, Trump won the presidency. A bullshit ending to a bullshit year. But even in the likelihood of more dark days ahead, I’m going to try my damnedest to stay open to the possibility that something good is always somewhere out there, too. And when I start to doubt it, I’ll just crank up my favorite songs and be reminded of their magic.